Thursday, May 07, 2009

Yogi Sundays

This was one of my favorite strips when I was a kid because it was drawn so well and it's so appealing. Most of these are Eisenberg, but a couple panels confuse me.Like these kids look like Gene Hazelton kids, but Yogi and BooBoo are totally Eisenberg.These are definitely Harvey... I love this style. Ed Benedict mid-century modern, mixed with construction and composition, organic angles (as opposed to straight lines and hard corners).I wish someone would collect all these into a nice book, but I doubt it will happen, because it's not a comic that originated as a strip. It might be considered too low class by publishers.I don't know though, it's so well drawn and fun that I think these pages should be hanging in a museum....or in my house!

The way I understand it is that Gene Hazelton would do some very rough preliminary work on all or most of the Yogi and Flintstone strips, and then hand those off to artists like Harvey Eisenberg, Pete Alvarado and Dale Hale to finish the art. Of course Hazelton himself often finished the art as well. That's probably why you will see hints of Hazelton in the other artist's work.

The bark on the trees in the first two panels is rendered with a lot of care; the way the bark lines curl around the root of the tree It reminds me of Samuel Palmer, an English visionary artist from the mid 1800's, who drew landscapes.

Trees figure pretty significantly in Boo Boo Runs Wild; both narratively and visually. There's a great vignette of the wild Boo Boo sitting in a Frazetta- esque grove of trees; there's the screaming trees; and there's the forest of paranoid eyes that Yogi goes running though, after he catches Boo Boo and Cindy enflagrante- a funny, horrifying, and moving scene, all at the same time.

Is there any chance of more Hanna Barbera cartoons directed by John K?

John, I'm not sure those are Gene Hazelton kids... as Mark said, maybe Gene roughed them in. It looks like a lesser artist copying some of the superficial elements of Gene's kids, like the shark eyes and pug noses, but without his flair or even the underlying construction